Scars
by Unspoken Tragedy
Summary: They may not be the most beautiful of things, scars.  But nothing can so effectively testify that we survived than those ugly white lines.  Professor Snape teaches a different kind of lesson.


**Title: Scars**

**Author: Unspoken Tragedy**

**Rating: PG-13**

**Spoilers: None **

**Disclaimer: I don't own Snape. I don't own Hogwarts.**

**Summery: ****They may not be the most beautiful of things, scars. But nothing can so effectively testify that we **_**survived**_** than those ugly white lines.**

**Series: None**

**Warnings: OC. Yeah, I promise she's not too annoying. I mean, she never even got a name. Also: cutting and abuse are mentioned. Very briefly.**

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**Scars**

She sat in the chair across from his desk, quaking from a combination of fear and shame. Tears slid down her cheeks, but she remained silent- her only claim to the famed determination of Slytherin.

"I do hope there is a reasonable explanation for all of this," he told her calmly.

"I didn't _want_ to hurt her." The little girl avoided his gaze.

A slight raise of his eyebrow stated that he, clearly, did not believe this. "Oh?"

"She was really mean!"

"You sent her straight to the hospital ward," he hissed, "And you say _she _was being mean?"

The girl did break down into sobs this time. "Sh-she said that I was a freak. Normal people don't have scars all over their faces."

Snape sighed. He folded his hands together on the desk and regarded her seriously. "Are you ashamed of these scars?" he asked her.

She looked up at him. "Shouldn't I be?"

"And why should you?"

"I don't- I dunno." She flinched away as he suddenly stood.

They were really only two thin scars down the side of her cheek. There were rumors as to where the girl had obtained them, but as far as her Head of House knew she had told no one. He stepped around the desk and knelt before her chair.

"Everyone says they're ugly." He understood that to a twelve year old girl, beauty was a big deal. Without the scars, she would not have been beautiful. Her features, when isolated would be quite stunning. Altogether, however, she looked rather like a mismatched puzzle. Her nose was too small and her eyes too big. Her black hair too short and her face too round.

He lifted her chin and took a long look at her scarred cheek. She seemed to stop breathing in her terror. "I don't see the problem," he told her.

She blinked. "Professor?"

He moved away from her. "Do you remember what happened?"

She nodded. More tears escaped. "My dad…" She wrung her hands. "It was the last time he ever hit me."

"And are you sorry for this?"

"No!" she cried.

He nodded. "When I was a child I had a rough time relating to my peers. Three in particular wanted nothing more than to make my school days a living hell." He unbuttoned his right sleeve and watched in interest as she tensed up. His Slytherins were rather suspicious, weren't they?

As he rolled his sleeve up to his elbow she leaned in earnestly, apparently forgetting her fear, eager for whatever secret he was about to show her. "I found my own ways of dealing with things, as turning to authority did nothing to discourage my tormentors." Light scars crisscrossed his arm.

She winced as she must have realized where those scars came from. "It's been a while since I've resorted to such… methods, but the scars pretty steadily remain."

Snape pulled the sleeve down. "They may not be the most beautiful of things, scars. But nothing can so effectively testify that we _survived_ than those ugly white lines. Will you ever forget that you escaped your father's abuse?"

She shook her head emphatically.

"Then why do you wish erase the proof of it, however ugly it may be?"

The little dark haired girl placed her fingertips atop the lines that marred her face. And for the first time since gaining them, she smiled.

"You are dismissed," Severus Snape told her. "Report to me Monday evening."

"For?"

"You didn't think that an attack upon a fellow student would go unpunished, did you? You've earned yourself a month's worth of detentions."

She sighed as she exited the dark office of her Potion's professor, but she couldn't deny that she felt better leaving than she had upon entering.

The next time she was teased about her face, she simply sneered an insult back at the girl who'd said it. Ironically, this time it was the other that left in tears. She thought that maybe had her professor seen it, he would be proud of her.

She wasn't about to tell him about it though. It wasn't as if she actually enjoyed detention.

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**The end.**

**A/N: Whilst over at the GA forums, I stumbled across a topic covering why the presence of cutting made so many readers cringe.**

**Here's my attempt to prove that cutting can be written about without making it maudlin and god awful like so many writers have made it out to be.**

**Oh, and if you want to concrit, go ahead. Just don't bitch at me about writing about something I don't know about when you really don't know whether or not I actually do. Got it? **


End file.
